Acer Aspire V3-574G review

The keyboard is adequate, with reasonably grippy keys and just enough travel to make typing comfortable. The keyboard is also backlit, although the letter characters themselves aren’t translucent so the all the lighting serves to do is show you where the keys are, not what’s on them.

The V3-574G’s credibility as an on-the-road companion is helped by reasonable battery life. Most laptops with dedicated graphics tend to fall well short of 4 hours in our battery benchmark, and while the 4h 22m this machine ultimately achieved is certainly nothing special, it puts itself well above the rival Dell Inspiron 15 5000, which is commendable.

3D performance is great, too. The 2GB Nvidia GeForce 940M won’t be able to handle the latest games at maximum settings, but if you do some serious graphical tweaking or drop the resolution, you’ll see playable performance from many of today’s 3D games. I was able to get a playable 47fps in the Dirt Showdown benchmark at 1,920×1,080 with Medium settings and MSAA switched off, but if you’d prefer to have more graphical effects, dropping the resolution is also an option. As long as you’re prepared to be flexible, you’ll be able to have some gaming fun with this laptop.

The only real area where the V3-574G falls short is in screen quality. It can only display 58% of the sRGB colour gamut, which in itself isn’t a huge problem if you’re used to the fairly drab screens on cheaper laptops. It is at least bright, at 258cd/m2, which goes some way to disguise its lack of colour coverage, and while 696:1 contrast is nothing to shout about, text is crisp and sharp, and vertical and horizontal viewing angles are great. The display is a compromise, but I’m reasonably happy with the result.

The Acer Aspire V3-574G is a well made and powerful mid-range laptop with enough power to tackle 3D games and most general applications – especially single-threaded ones. Considering it’s just £40 more than the impressive Dell Inspiron 15 5000 but is more powerful, it an obvious Best Buy laptop. Acer stock, specification (screen, processor, RAM and storage) vary wildly and prices change rapidly and unpredictably, however, so be sure that the laptop you’re buying is the same as the one on review here – model NX.G1TEK.011. For alternatives check out our Best laptops and buying guide.